Feminist theories of sexual difference are complex.
Feminist theory, as a generic term, involves a critique which brings together many different fields of research: psychoanalysis; philosophy; social sciences; and political theory. These fields include psychoanalysis developed after Freud and Lacan as well as Marxist thought. Feminist theory requires an analysis of language use, a critique of reason and male bias, an examination of human forms of subjectivity in terms of gender and how political subjects acquire recognisable political, social, psychological forms of sexed and simultaneously gendered identities.
In this short and basic course, it is not possible to point to all the resources and research on this subject. Nor to give an historical overview of the developments in these debates over the last forty years. Nor to point to the many different branches and schools of thought in feminist theory where theories of sexual difference are discussed.
You can find feminist critiques of all the writers most associated with post-structuralism: but particularly Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.
Among the “post-structuralist” camps are several key feminist writers: Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler.
There are many feminist analyses of feminism’s engagement with post-structuralism: in the writings of Rosi Braidotti, Chris Weedon, Christine Battersby, Teresa Brennan, Margaret Whitford, Chantal Mouffe, Nancy Fraser, Seyla Benhabib or Somer Brodribb.
Post-structuralism developed as a critique of structuralism, as a mode of analysis of language/power/apprehension of the world and a critique of Enlightenment thought based in rationalism and pragmatism – particularly its models of progress and implicit/explicit projection of a singular narrative of World development or History. It also drew on psychoanalysis developed by Lacan and on revisions to Marxism.
Structuralism, argues that rethinking or analysing how a system works will enable us to understand how social, psychologically, linguistic and other systems of representation produce meaning (see this page on Structuralism / PostStructuralism and key authors by Cambridge University). In structuralism, a binary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizational method within the construction of human philosophy, culture, and language.
Poststructuralist thought questions how binary oppositions operate and works to expose the systems of power/knowledge within them, with the goal of undermining them and/or exposing their “logic” in terms of inclusion/exclusion.
Feminist theory has developed theories of sexual difference by re-examining the post-structuralist critique of how binary oppositions structure language/culture/thought in the traditions of Western Enlightenment: – between, for example, terms like:
- culture/nature,
- men/women,
- active/passive,
- rational/irrational,
- reason/emotion,
- public/private.
- writing/speech
That one term in these binaries is privileged over the other is at the heart of post-structuralist methods of deconstruction and analysis of culture in relation to language: this is evident in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of language (1968) and attention to differance and not difference (yes! 1 letter different “a”, not “e”). This proposition regarding the differend is central to his critique of “logocentric” thought where the written word takes priority over speech.
Feminists have pointed out that in these binary oppositions, men have frequently been identified with culture, sameness (including homosociality – i.e. men’s social bonds with other men, not homosexuality), activity, reason and the public sphere (as well as rationality) and women allocated to associations with nature, difference, emotion and the private sphere (home), as well as passivity and irrationality. This is why the term phallogocentricism appears – to emphasis how the “phallus” (as a metaphor for male power/knowledge) remains dominant within logocentric thought.
This structure in language (of binary oppositions constructing arguments) is recognisable in many kinds of political speech, literature, religious sermons, advertising and films and many kinds of feminist analysis have drawn attention to the gendering of relations where men are privileged over women or women are judged as defective by male norms. For example, statements which do this include that ‘to be a human is to be a male’, or ‘a woman is an imperfect man’ or claims that ‘a woman is incapable of being a critic or philosopher, artist…genius’ because she is not a man or “lacks” x, y and z.
Post-structuralism has pointed out that it is not possible to undermine these relationships simply by reversing the value system associated with them: ie to argue that emotion is more important than reason or that the home is more important than the public sphere. This is because these two terms are co-dependent, they are not “polar” opposites. Each term in the binary opposition is not self-contained, they are linked. They are not sitting in two containers with completely separate contents that cannot be mixed. Instead, one side of the opposition creates/constructs its self-identity because of how it defines what it is not as the Other. The affirmation exists only because it rests on a definition formed through its difference to/with an Other. Neither self nor Other have independent existence. They mutually reinforce eachother.
There is only a definition of culture because it is “not” nature.
There is only a definition of men because they are “not” women and vice versa, women are defined negatively only in relation to not being men.
There is only a definition of activity because of what is rejected as passivity. The rational contains the irrational and defines itself in relation to what it is not.
It is this way of thinking about the world where these binary differences are the only way of speaking about the world that counts and other models of complexity or understanding are refused that feminism has questioned most.
As many post-colonial theorists have argued – after Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak – the creation of Colonialism affirmed the self-identity of the Colonised while creating the colonised as both slave, lesser and Other. That these “identities” of the Other contained many forms of projection, fantasy, wish-fulfillment and the creation of “Otherness” were because they were the product/production of the Coloniser and known only through their representations. The thoughts, feelings, self-identity of the colonised was not considered and were often absent from accounts of colonisation or colonial forms of anthropology.
It is only through a counter-history of this dominant account formed by the Colonisers in/through forms of post-colonial theory and history, that any understanding of the actual resistance of the colonised to Colonialisation can be reconstructed.
Art is no exception to these distinctions in the language used to describe artworks which frequently install a difference between art produced by men and art produced by women using a wide range of binary oppositions. The distinction between art/craft, for example, frequently carries gendered associations for women producers in combination with many other negative associations about repetitive, uncreative, or domestic work. The same holds true for the models of “Art” which are entirely Western, and relegate the art of Other Cultures to museums of World Culture or Anthropological settings.
If these are the “norms” in language, how does feminism offer a critique of binary thinking?
Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis in The Second Sex considers how men define themselves as subjects while simultaneously positioning women as Other.
Jenny Pinkus offered this definition of Feminist poststructuralism in August 1996 on Massey University’s website, New Zealand
Feminist philosophy of Self
from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Read: Mariam Staats A Very Short Summary of
Poststructuralist and Queer Feminist Theory and Practice on Oakland College’s website.
Or visit: Yvonne Doderer’s website project (English and German)
Doing Beyond Gender: Spaces, Strategies and Projects Beyond Gender.
Suggested reading:
Ellen Annandale and Judith Clark
Ellen Annandale and Judith Clark
‘What is gender? Feminist theory and the sociology of human reproduction’
Sociology of Health & Illness
Vol.18, No. 1,1996,pp. 17-44
Betta Pesole ‘The Feminist ‘Successor Science Project’ as a Transnational Epistemological Community’ Artigos 18 | 2012 : Epistemologias feministas: ao encontro da crÃtica radical
Feminists accounts of why deconstruction is useful for feminism
These are books. There are illegal or partial views of these books available online.
Diane Elam Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En Abyme (Routledge, 1994)
Moya Lloyd Beyond Identity Politics: Feminism, Power and Politics (Sage, 2006)
There are many other forms of binary opposition used to describe human relations which are closely related to these debates but centre on questions of identity vs. difference. In these models it is the “subject” who has an identity and creates other(s) through marking or outlining their “difference” from themselves as a subject.
Master/Slave
Heterosexual/Homosexual
White/Black
Family (self)/Stranger
Adult/Child
Employer (capitalist)/Employee (trade unionist)
Abuser/ Victim
These differences – in the construction of an identity vs. others who are different – are also power relations, created through social/ economic privilege and also as the result of different historical developments. The identity of a “subject” is typically regarded as “self-defined” in these categories but it is only through the “subject’s” objectification of “others” as “Other(s)” that they can actually be identified as a self: this is because the “self” has a “different” subjecthood from that which the subject/self names or despises as “lesser” or “dangerous” or “disruptive”.
The dominant school of thought in feminist theory in the visual arts has looked closely at Lacanian forms of psychoanalysis (Lacan was a psychoanalyst who reinterpreted Freud and developed his own school of thought) in conjunction with Marxist ideas about the formation of political subjects and how ideology (as a system of ideas, beliefs and values) works to determine/self-regulate behaviour. Feminist theorists have redefined these ideas in new ways: moving beyond Lacan’s ideas of “subject” and “Other” in his description of the formation of sex identity and human desire in order to ask questions about the stakes of women as political subjects, the formation of gendered identities and the complexity of human desires.
Theories of Sexual Difference are not about difference as division.
Most people regard any attention to difference as drawing attention to social division. Social divisions in our society and culture represent a major problem for ideas about self/Identity and who are “Others”. If you are ever placed as the Other to someone else’s identity, it is highly likely that you will be offended, regard it as insulting, not recognise yourself or self-identity there, and so accept that a mis-recognition of your identity has taken place.
Difference in this sense, as Trinh T. Minh-ha writes:-
is essentially “division” in the understanding of many. It is no more than a tool of self-defense and conquest. You and I might as well not walk into this semantic trap which sets up us against each other as expected by a certain ideology of separatism.
Trinh T. Minh-ha ‘Difference’ (1989) reproduced in Amelia Jones (ed) The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (Second Edition, Routledge, 2010).
This language of identity and difference is regularly used in hate-speech or to describe a sharp split between an “us” and a “them”.
It is necessary to recognise that the post-structuralist attention to difference in language and it’s critique of the binary structure of Western philosophical thought uses very similar vocabulary – identity, difference – but does not use the same words with the same meaning.
In common sense terms, the language for having and possessing an identity and making a difference between oneself and Others in a society has one singular purpose: recognising or acknowledging “division” or “separation”. In more dramatic terms, this demarcation between self and Other enforces an opposition between two groups of people – in which the sole aim is to justify or conduct an abuse of power – and mark one group (that of the subject/their family, peer group, caste or religion or colour) as preferable to the group marked as Other(s). This has been the basis of conflict, violence, war, racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, homophobia, bullying and abuse. Ideologies of “apartheid”, of “separate development”, “of ghettoising or belittling minority cultures” reinforce this distinction of sameness and difference; self-identity and Otherness. In self-defense, the same language of identity politics can easily be played back in reverse so that those named as Others band together to form an identity between “selves”, and resist the “Others” who denigrate them.
Difference as uniqueness or special identity is both limiting and deceiving. If identity refers to the whole pattern of sameness within a human life, the style of a continuing me that permeates all the changes undergone, then difference remains within the boundary of that which distinguishes one identity from another….Can identity, indeed, be viewed other than as a byproduct of a “manhandling” of life, one that, in fact, refers no more to a consistent “pattern of sameness” than to an inconsequential process of otherness?
Trinh T. Minh-ha ‘Difference’ (1989) reproduced in Amelia Jones (ed) The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (Second Edition, Routledge, 2010).
How can we think positively about difference as an enrichment of humanity and not as a source of conflict between named groups? How can we think about others without it becoming a “threat” to our sense of self, recognise strangers as “guests” and be tolerant, listen to where there are differences without believing that it automatically undermines any sense of self?
There are many black women writers, like Audre Lorde, who have argued that the Master’s Tools will not dismantle the Master’s House – as a warning to other feminists to pay attention to the question of differences between women, and to forge alliances between women from different social groups to ensure a wide representation of women. Lorde spoke out to avoid what she saw as the feminist movement’s tokenising of Other women who were not from the same peer group as themselves. As she argues, the conversation about how the personal is political cannot be continued if one speaks only to one’s immediate peer group. Open and direct communication with others is the only way to overcome these problems.
Theories of difference continues in Part 3
Radical Thinkers: the art, sex and politics of feminism
Tate Modern event, 9 Feb 2015
Stella Sandford – The Critical Theory of Sex, lecture at Goldsmiths’ College,
1 May 2015
The sex/gender distinction has been fundamental to Anglophone feminist theory since the 1970s, in various different ways. Many feminists, seeing a direct political advantage in a vocabulary that allowed them to distinguish between what they saw as the biological reality of sex and normative masculinity and femininity, embraced ‘gender’ as a category of analysis. What is the relation of the sex/gender distinction and its theoretical vicissitudes to the social reality of everyday gendered lives?
Stella Sandford is Professor Of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. She has written extensively on the philosophy of sex and gender, feminist theory and psychoanalytic theory. Her books include How to read Beauvoir (2006) and Plato and Sex (2010).
